Hacker News Reader

Comment by robin_reala | Hacker News Reader

As nice as this is, it would have been even better if they’d used an understandable CC licence instead of the custom non-commercial sub-A4 one they’ve decided on. There are at least a couple of museums now that have licenced their entire digital artworks as CC0[1][2], and I’ve been talking to Munchmuseet in Oslo recently who are planning to licence their entire new digitised collection[3] as CC4 (free use with attribution).

It’s important for me as I need PD (or CC0, which is functionally equivalent) to pick decent cover art for Standard Ebooks[4] works. As it is we usually spend hours hunting through pre-1923 art books on Hathi for the perfect piece, and CC0 collections make that much much easier.

[1] https://metmuseum.org/art/collection/

[2] https://www.rijksmuseum.nl/en/rijksstudio

[3] http://munch.emuseum.com/

[4] https://standardebooks.org/

View on HN

I really don't understand your comment, and all subsequent responses along the same line. The digitized van Gogh paintings are perfect copies of the original public domain works. For the US, Bridgeman Art Library v. Corel Corp. [1] makes it perfectly clear that the images are not protected by copyright, and there is similar law and legislation in Europe.

What do you mean with the ability of the museums to choose a license for the paintings, and what is the "sub-A4" license you refer to?

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bridgeman_Art_Library_v._Corel....

I believe the problem lies in the wording of ‘exact’. Without a direct comparison to the source material ‘exact’ could be challenged. There’s also the problem of exact dating of a piece of art as being pre-1923. With a reproduction in a published book you have a publishing date in the colophon that logically must be the same year or later than the reproduction of the artwork inside. Without that you’re relying on the artist’s date of death or supporting material such as an original bill of sale to make the distinction.

Basically, the problem is that when you’re releasing a derivative work with CC0 you need to be 100% sure that your original licensing is correct. We’re probably being overly-cautious, but luckily the imprint style allows us to be.

(The A4 licence comes from their T&Cs PDF: “Images of the Van Gogh Museum collection up to and including A4 size in TIF format may be downloaded and distributed for non-commercial use”.)

What if I download an "A4" and distribute an "A3" with exactly the same pixels?

No idea, and that’s the problem: the licence is badly defined. Ideally they would have used one of the pre-existing CC licences that people already understand.

Agreed. It's annoying that we need special permissions on old public domain artwork. Depending on where you're at they can't prevent you from using it freely. In the US at least there is precedent that exact digital copies of public domain works are not able to receive copyright protection (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bridgeman_Art_Library_v._Corel...). Though this isn't universal throughout the world (https://blog.wikimedia.org/2017/07/25/wikimedia-sweden-freed...).

SE’s decided that that isn’t enough unfortunately, so we go for pre-1923 publication in the US in a book or magazine as our yardstick. Better to be absolutely certain if you’re releasing a subsequent work into PD.

If the photos of public domain paintings are exact and not modified, then they also fall under public domain.

I think the UK has mostly settled for cc-by-sa (attribution share-alike) which is at least tolerable. Non-commercial is a minefield even for public sector usage.

Just wanted to say that Standard Ebooks is one of my favorite projects ever.

As it so happens, I'm building a side project centered around cataloging art. I'm curious - what is "Hathi"?

Oh sorry, should have linked: https://hathitrust.org . It’s a super-comprehensive set of book and magazine scans. Think Google Books, but with actual content and a proper advanced search.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com